Social and Economic Policy

Children's rights, crime & justice, immigration & asylum, pensions, poverty, youth, ...

Strike to push up wages and benefits - Squeeze profits, tax wealth

In the midst of the cost-of-living misery, the Sunday Times has released its “Rich List” for this year. Rishi Sunak and his wife Akshata Murthy are on for the first time; their £730 million puts them 222nd. The total wealth of the thousand richest individuals or households listed is £711 billion, up 8% from last year. The combined wealth of the top 250 is more than that of the entire list five years ago. In 2019 the UK had 151 billionaries; in 2021 171; and now 177. The richest thousand are only a small minority of the capitalist class in the UK, and many other capitalists are doing well too...

Tories in turmoil: seize the chance to oust them

In many ways the result of Conservative MPs’ 6 June confidence vote in Boris Johnson — 148 of 359 voting no confidence, 41% — is a good one for the labour movement. Of course it would have felt good to see the tinpot Mussolini ousted. But his removal by Tory MPs and replacement with another leader, equally or more right-wing but less discredited and less tinpot, could have enabled the Tories to get out of their spiral of u-turns and scandals. Now Johnson will continue with about half his MPs having advertised that they distrust or despise him. The whole government will likely be discredited...

Labour's economic policy vacuum

What is Labour’s economic policy now that the Tories have taken up the windfall tax? If by “Labour policy”, you mean policy passed by Labour conferences, there is lots, starting with public ownership of the energy industry and repeal of all the anti-union laws. If you mean policy found in official published Labour documents, even then there is a fair bit. If you mean policy voiced by the Labour leaders, there is none , beyond that they want “growth”. That is odd at a time of economic turmoil, when even dissident Tories are proposing such things as UK re-entry to the EU Single Market, and...

What policies can defend and raise living standards?

An emergency plan The labour movement should campaign, and demand Labour campaigns, for: • Reversing the £20 UC cut; benefit increases with inflation and above • A major real-terms rise for public sector workers, as part of winning rises for all workers • Scrap all anti-union laws to help push up wages • A major increase in the minimum wage, to £15, for all • Sick pay at least at the minimum wage level, for all • Rent controls • Taking the energy companies into public ownership (a windfall tax to subsidise energy bills is necessary — but no solution) • Taxing the rich — all of them, as much as...

Drive out the Tories! Drive out their policies!

A few days before Solidarity went to press, Tory MPs and the Tory press were declaring that critics of Boris Johnson over the “Partygate” scandals should shut up. “What a farcical waste of time and £460,000” shouted the front page of Daily Mail . Then on Monday 23 May new photos of Johnson, apparently showing him making a speech making a speech at a packed party, drink in hand, reopened the affair. Johnson and co. are a disgrace. But even the Partygate misdemeanours are a relatively minor part of that. They didn’t just ignore lockdown rules they insisted on for others, but oversaw policies...

Fight back against Sunak's inequality push

After the 23 March Spring Statement from Rishi Sunak, the UK’s richest MP with personal wealth of over £200m, the government’s own Office of Budget Responsibility (OBR) predicts that average real household incomes will fall 2.2% over the next 12 months — “the biggest fall in living standards in any single financial year since ONS [Office of National Statistics] records began in 1956-7”. Meanwhile, the latest gross rate of return (profits) for private non-financial corporations was 10.8% (Q2-3, 2021), up on the rate in 2019 Q2-3. The FTSE share index, a measure of capitalists’ expectations of...

New Tory push for "Singapore-on-Thames"

In 2017 the media and right-wing Brexiteers began to talk about “Singapore-on-Thames”, in response to an interview by Tory chancellor Philip Hammond (who in fact had not mentioned Singapore). Following the appointment of Jacob Rees-Mogg to the new position of “Secretary of State for Brexit Opportunities and Government Efficiency”, the phrase is circulating again. Hammond’s idea was that if the UK was not able to gain adequate access to the EU market, it would need to become “something different” from the “European social model”. He said wanted to avoid that. The Tory right, long eager to evade...

Carbon offset is deceit

Oil giant Total is in the process of opening up a new oil field off the coast of Suriname containing an estimated ten billion barrels of oil and 30 trillion cubic feet of gas. Total’s exploration and drilling takes place in a world where 60% of developed reserves must stay in the ground if we are to have half a chance of halting warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius. However, according to the Total, this project remains within their “Net Zero” goals because of a $50 million carbon offset bought from the Suriname government. The “carbon offset” will not draw down any carbon from the atmosphere; it...

Tories' level-up is a sham

The Tories issued their “Levelling Up” White Paper on 2 February as part of a surge of bluster designed to stop Boris Johnson being toppled. In fact, we won’t win real levelling-up without some levelling-down of the Tories and the wealthy class they represent. The rest of us will never be “levelled up” to the same rate of luxury and power as the top one per cent have now. We do not want to level down to universal poverty. With advancing technologies, it is possible to level up the whole population of Britain, and even of the world, to a rate of comfort, of access to culture and free time, of...

The arrogance of the super-rich

Boris Johnson rose to be Tory leader and prime minister because of his talent for lying, not despite it. The job of a Tory prime minister who has to win elections is to help the ultra-wealthy while also convincing enough of the working-class majority that we’re being helped too. Modestly, of course, because “the country can’t afford” more, but helped. The job also is to push the majority into accepting limitations, and getting us at least to half-believe that similar limitations are respected by the super-rich. All that is not a matter just of Boris Johnson’s personality. The basic patterns...

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